Tag: dataviz

Online maps that we use for directions use the Mercator projection, and this tends to dictate how we perceive the size of countries and continents. If you look at the world map on Google, for example, Africa doesn’t look that much bigger compared to China or the United States. In reality though, it’s a lot bigger. Kai Krause scales countries by their area in square kilometers and then fits them into a Africa’s borders for some perspective.

Facebook intern Paul Butler was interested in the locations of friendships, so he decided to create a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe. How local are our friends? Where are the highest concentration of friendships? How do political and geological boundaries affect them?

Butler started by using a sample of 10 million friend pairs, correlated them with their current cities and then mapped that data using the longitude and latitude of each city.

Worldprocessor is an interesting project started on 1988 by the anthropologist and artist Ingo Günther. Ingo creates beautiful globes by representing on them different kinds of information in a visually appealing way. Exhibitions of the globes have been done all around the world. More information about the globes below and many others can be found in his catalogue or in his blog, where he posts photos of the globes regularly. The works are also published on an artistic book.

Life expectancy is a core factor in the human development index. With 82 years Japan has the highest life expectancy. All 35 countries at the bottom of this list are located in sub-Saharan Africa; their citizen's average life expectancy is between 52 and 39 years.